Mediatized Warfare

Mediatization, defined as a deepening interrelationship between digital media and society, engenders higher-order processes of societal transformation. These processes predicate the emergence of hybrid social domains, reflexively connected through their reliance on digital technologies. Mediatized warfare is one such hybrid domain – present-day digital media inevitably shape individual and public perceptions of wartime realities, whereby civilian actors can participate in sociotechnical networks surrounding military conflicts, altering public perceptions of war. My research presents a social inquiry into mediatized warfare: setting digitally-networked activism against the backdrop of a military conflict, I explore people’s practices in mobilizing grassroots resistance against a military threat.

Dissertation:
Battlefront Assemblages: Civic Participation in the Age of Mediatized Warfare (dissertation committee: Jennifer Stromer-Galley (chair), Jackie Orr, Jeff Hemsley, Bryan Semaan, Brian Taylor, Tanya Lokot).

Publications:

Boichak, O. (2021) Digital War: Mediatized Conflicts in Sociological Perspective. In D. Rohlinger & S. Sobieraj (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. Oxford University Press.

Boichak, O. (2022) Camouflage aesthetics: militarisation, craftivism, and the in/visibility of resistance at scale. Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations, 3(1), p. 1-13. https://cvir.st-andrews.ac.uk/articles/abstract/1561/

Boichak, O. & Asmolov, G. (2021) Crowdfunding in remote conflicts: Bounding the hyperconnected battlefield. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12147

Boichak, O. & Jackson, S. (2020) Between National Identity and State Legitimacy: Mobilizing Digitally Networked Publics in Eastern Ukraine. Media, War & Conflict, 13(3), 258-279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635219829161

Boichak, O. (2017). Battlefront Volunteers: Mapping and Deconstructing Civilian Resilience Networks in Ukraine. In 8th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Social Media for Good or Evil, #SMSociety 2017 (Vol. Part F129683). DOI: 10.1145/3097286.3097289

Presentations:

Theorizing the Web 2018 (#TtW18)

Mediatizing War: Digital Media and the Battlefronts (art-presentation)